Your Oxford Story: Anthony Green
Anthony Green
“The people here really seem to believe that assessment should make a difference in learners’ lives – and that belief shapes the way we work.”
Language assessment has been at the heart of my career for as long as I can remember, and I find myself just as fascinated by the questions it raises today as I was when I started out. I spent nearly two decades at CRELLA, the Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment at the University of Bedfordshire, eventually serving as Director. As Professor of Language Assessment, I worked with researchers, governments, and testing organizations on some genuinely complex challenges: how we design assessments, what they can actually tell us, and what effect they have on the people who take them.
Research has taken me into many different contexts along the way – from benchmarking university English tests across South Asia to helping establish assessment literacy initiatives in Ukraine – but the constant thread has been collaboration. One of the great privileges of my career has been working with early-career researchers and watching them grow into thoughtful, independent scholars who push the field in directions I wouldn’t have imagined.
That same collaborative mindset shaped some of my most recent work. The Oxford Test of English published a whitepaper with Times Higher Education titled “The future of English proficiency testing: Why universities are rethinking language assessment”. As the university experience becomes increasingly digital, interdisciplinary, and collaborative, the paper asks whether current English language tests are genuinely measuring the communication skills students need for today’s world. These are questions I’ve been returning to throughout my career, not just as abstract research problems, but as practical challenges that matter to institutions, educators, and learners alike.
I joined OUP five months ago because I wanted to work somewhere that sees English language assessment not as a barrier, but as a support for learning and a route to greater opportunity. What has always set OUP English language teaching resources apart is how our organization embraces the idea of assessment as integral to learning. The people here really seem to believe that assessment should make a difference in learners’ lives – and that belief shapes the way we work.
As Director of Oxford English Assessment Research, my focus is on the qualities that make assessments genuinely trustworthy and useful: their validity, fairness, reliability, and, above all, their real-world impact. What that means in practice is building the evidence base that helps our assessments earn the recognition they deserve – whether that’s through CEFR alignment, technical documentation, or research that demonstrates what our tests actually measure and what difference they make to the people who take them. I’m continually struck by how much rigorous, practically meaningful research there is to do in this space, and how much it matters to get it right.
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